Luck, Money, and Love in "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Introduction: A Spooky Fantasy of Perverted Values

In the short story "The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, the writer creates a spooky fantasy in which three major themes — luck, money, and love — combine to form a bizarre and deadly unity. The boy Paul, intuitively feeling the lack of love in his family, becomes the embodiment of his parents' obsessions with money. Riding his toy rocking horse, he receives supernatural messages that allow him to pick winners in real horse races. He believes that he thereby renews his family's luck by winning money, which he equates on an unconscious level with love. Lawrence uses the unified themes of luck, money, and love to create a symbolic representation of life that is not truly lived — one in which these concepts are perverted into an imitation of life, and the falseness of that imitation kills the boy Paul.

Money as a Substitute for Love

This is a story about the "devastating effects that money can have on a family" (Watkins 295). It is a story in which money has replaced love. The mother no longer loves the father: "She married for love, and the love turned to dust" (Lawrence 967). Her love, Lawrence is saying, has dried up:

"The desiccating materialism of modern society has destroyed the ability of Paul's mother to feel love; in place of love, she lusts after 'luck,' by which she means the power to get money" (Watkins 1).

The family's house is "haunted by the unspoken phrase: 'There must be more money!'" (Lawrence 968). The children absorb this atmosphere daily. They know there is never enough money for the parents to maintain the social standard to which they aspire. The parents are the role models who "set the tone (economic scarcity) and determine the values (consumerism) of the world they inhabit" (Watkins 297). This is a subject about which Lawrence is passionate:

"This is one of Lawrence's most savage and compact critiques of what he elsewhere calls 'the god-damn bourgeoisie' and of individuals who, despite their natural or potential goodness, 'swallow culture bait' and hence become victims to the world they (wrongly) believe holds the key to human happiness" (Watkins 295).

Paul's Obsession: Luck, Lucre, and the Mother's Approval

The boy Paul becomes curious about all the dissatisfaction he senses in the house and asks his mother questions. The mother tells him that his "father has no luck" (Lawrence 968). With the help of his Uncle Oscar, the boy confuses luck with lucre, which implies the negative connotation of "filthy lucre."

"Paul's identifying 'luck' with 'lucre,' overtly accidental, is covertly quite correct, for the socio-psychological confusion of values has resulted in the equation Love = luck = lucre. To give his mother love, Paul must have the lucre that comes with luck" (Watkins 1).

The mother furthers the development of the boy's obsession by admitting that to her, luck means money:

"Oh!" said the boy. "Then what is luck, mother?"

"It's what causes you to have money. If you're lucky you have money. That's why it's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money. But if you're lucky, you will always get more money."

"Oh! Will you? And is father not lucky?"

"Very unlucky, I should say," she said bitterly (Lawrence 968–969).

It is obvious to Paul that his mother's love is contingent on luck — that is, on the family's ability to supply her with money. His father has lost her love because he is "not lucky" (Lawrence 969).

Immediately, the boy, reaching out for love, asserts his difference from his father: "I'm a lucky person" (Lawrence 969). When he tells his mother that God has told him he has luck, he can see she doesn't believe him, and: "This angered him somewhere, and made him want to compel her attention" (Lawrence 969). The attention he wants could also be described as love — love that would give him a sense of his own being and his life. Many Lawrence scholars see in Paul's obsession an Oedipal conflict: "Paul wanting to supplant his sire by supplying his mother with the fruits of the 'luck' the father lacks" (Beauchamp 1). This rings true, for just as Jocasta sets in motion the tragedy of Oedipus, this tragedy too begins with "a son's victimization by his mother" (Kearney 181). In his search for luck that will win his mother's love, Paul turns to his rocking horse:

"He went off by himself, vaguely, in a childish way, seeking for the clue to 'luck.' Absorbed, taking no heed of other people, he went about with a sort of stealth, seeking inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery, he would sit on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, his eyes had a strange glare in them. The little girls dared not speak to him" (Lawrence 969).

Conclusion: No One Is a Winner

Lawrence in his story "The Rocking-Horse Winner" constructs an ironic satire in which no one is a winner. The three themes at the core of this story — luck, money, and love — unite to support Lawrence's passionate premise that perverted attitudes toward money create horror stories in human lives. A devouring mother who values only luck and money learns too late that her lifeless values have turned her loveless heart to stone. A boy who rides a wooden horse will not live to find himself a real winner in life's gamble. The love that Paul seeks with such frenzy cannot be found in a house where luck and money are valued more than life.

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